Epilogue

I am being watched. I think, perhaps, since the first day of my life, but certainly since we buried Thomas Terrywile in Coombs’ Gulch. And I am being watched by others. For a long time I was locked in a hospital where I was on ‘suicide watch’, and nurses, accompanied by big orderlies, would come to me with needles when I tried to tell them the truth. The injections made me dizzy and tired. I would sleep for days, drifting in and out of this world and finding myself back in the Gulch, seeing visions of Jacob trapped in the dark nothingness. In those long hours of unconsciousness, I relived my previous life, over and over again. I made different decisions; I walked various paths. But each time, I ended in the same place. Our lives are preordained nightmares. Our strings are attached to the puppeteers and cannot be cut. I would wake and try to tell them, tell them about Jacob, tell them about me, and each time it was another needle and a return to the darkness. I drifted in and out of alternate realities that all ended the same, and behind it I sensed the horrid truth.

I was watched by them for a long time until I finally learned to shut up and keep the truth to myself so they finally let me out.

Mary was gone by then. I tried to reach her, but she was gone from me, from everything, I suppose. I went to the house. The locks were changed, and it was empty. There was a For Sale sign in the front yard.

The police watched me for a long time. I would spot an inconspicuously dressed man or a dark-colored sedan behind me at various intervals, keeping track of where I went and what I did. They followed me when I drove out to that place in the forest where they had followed Jacob’s scent to the very end. The design of rocks had been removed to discourage the curious public, but I found the spot and knew that I was in the right place. I could feel it. Standing there, I closed my eyes and felt close to it – to that place where my boy was trapped, to the demon-god that kept him there. I could practically see it, and in that moment I heard a distant whispering. Something in the trees urging me to action, to do something terrible.

Do you see?

I saw.

The police tail didn’t last long. Jacob’s case went cold for everyone but me. I think even Mary gave up after a couple of years. I would occasionally call her, but her voice was dead and distant. There was nothing between us anymore. Perhaps Jacob was all that really held us together – our tether – and once he was gone, Mary and I were connected by nothing more than an absence. Once, I tried to tell her what I knew, but she immediately launched into histrionics. She didn’t want to hear it. It was insane, a product of a broken mind. “What were you doing out there in those mountains?” she asked once, but I did not have an answer that anyone wanted to hear or believe, so I said nothing.

But I understood what she was asking in that question: How was I connected to Jacob’s disappearance? Did I do what everyone suspected, but could not prove? She once told a television reporter that I was a good man, that I had nothing to do with Jacob’s disappearance. She had steeled herself, set her jaw and told the world that I could never do something like that. But the answer to Mary’s question wasn’t so simple. I was responsible. Looking back over all the difficulty I put my family through leading up to that awful day, I was responsible for so much. Sometimes, I felt I was partly responsible for every damn horrible thing that happened in the world. And maybe I was. Maybe we all are. Maybe that’s why I can’t look at anyone with a straight face.

Mary still does interviews every now and then, typically on the anniversary of Jacob’s disappearance, which has some imaginary importance media outlets can make a headline out of – two years, five years, ten years.

A few years after I was released from the hospital, I found Rich, the old hunter I had once asked about the most dangerous animal to hunt. He lived in the same place and was very familiar with the circumstances and stories surrounding what had happened to me and Jacob. I looked ragged. I was practically homeless, sleeping in some no-name motel on my earnings as a line cook for a wedding hall, a place where young men and women start their lives together like gears being milled for work in an unknowable machine. Those days were filled with regret, the constant reminder of all I had lost. I looked on those couples and wondered what secrets they hid from each other that could eventually rise up and swallow them whole.

Rich answered the door and looked at me like he might kill me. I told him I wanted to hear more about the polar bears, about the white tundra of the North Pole, about what made him so uneasy hunting them.

“I didn’t hunt them,” he said, his voice insistent and animated. “I was a contractor for an oil company working in the Arctic Circle. My job was to keep the workers safe, keep the executives with their two-thousand-dollar parkas from being eaten by the wolves or the bears, or kicked to death by an angry mama moose. Even back then, white men couldn’t hunt them. The Inuits had special laws that allowed polar bear hunting in particular seasons. But I was there to defend the bigwigs and employees from threats when they had to go on expeditionary excursions. Frankly, I didn’t do much. I think they kept me around because it looked good, made a good story, made them feel like they were doing something to keep themselves safe up there. We lost more men to them getting drunk, wandering out into the tundra and freezing to death, than anything else. The six months of light and the six months of darkness threw a lot of them off, made them crazy, in a way. I was used to it. I had done military training stints up there. It’s a different kind of place. It’s like a world that functions according to a different set of rules – physics, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t have any trouble. Didn’t even get to shoot anything, just basically kept an eye on things from a distance. The animals didn’t come close, really. But there was one time.

“We were going out to scout a new pipeline route. A real desolate area. Nothing but snow and hillocks and frozen tundra. We took a helicopter in. It was bright that day. The snow blinds you, so I had on goggles. They make everything look flat. You can’t see the contours of the land. It’s hard to distinguish what’s alive and what isn’t. I wasn’t too concerned at first because nearly everything up there is cold and dead.

“But I could feel it almost as soon as we stepped off that helicopter. Something out there, something watching. The thing with polar bears is they rarely come across humans. They don’t know to stay away. They don’t distinguish between food sources up there. A human might as well be a seal who can’t swim, and there we were, six fat seals all lined up like a buffet.

“You ever seen how polar bears hunt? They’re patient. They wait and stalk for hours. And you can’t see them out there in all that white. They’ll sit dead motionless watching. They’ll wait till the wind is kicking up snow like a blizzard so their movement is hidden. They’ll be staring straight at you with those triangular heads just a few yards off, and you can’t see them. But you can feel it sometimes. Maybe it’s those leftover instincts from our caveman days. Anyway, we were no sooner on the ground than I could feel it. It was just us out there. Not another human soul for hundreds of miles, but I could feel something watching us. I glassed every bit of that tundra, couldn’t see nothing. I kept the executives and engineers in a tight group and separated myself to draw whatever it was out toward me. I was carrying a .45-70. A close-up gun. A hundred yards at best. I knew anything out there would be up close, fast and personal.

“I was a few hundred yards from the group. I looked back and could see them in their little huddle against the wind, so many layers of clothing and gear they looked like a poor man’s astronaut, that big whirlybird sitting on the snow with its blades bending toward the ground. Then I turned back, and in a rock outcropping I could make something out – an outline of white on white with a little black triangle of a nose, still as rock, pointing right at me. I put the binoculars up and looked. I knew what I was looking for, but he was still impossible to see. I didn’t want to backtrack. I didn’t want to turn my back. They run so fast. Fast enough to run up on a seal before it slips into the sea. I just stared at him, and he stared back at me. I was pretty sure I could make out those beady little eyes.

“I put that Remington up to my shoulder and sighted that black nose in as best I could. It was then I heard something on the wind. My name. Someone was screaming my name. I broke concentration for a second and turned to look over my left shoulder back toward the group, and it was then that I saw this massive white mass pounding across the snow toward me, flanking me. This big male was coming at me like a freight train. It was so fast. There was so much force behind it. For a moment I was completely stunned – literally immobile with fear and surprise. He was ten yards away when I got off my first shot. I didn’t have time for a second. But I was lucky. A head shot. All fifteen hundred pounds of him came sliding up to my feet.”

“They were hunting in pairs? I didn’t think polar bears did that.”

“They don’t. There was no other bear. I was staring at the rock outcropping, thinking I saw something that wasn’t there. I imagined it, made a bear out of some random rocks and snow, and the whole time that big bear was moving up on me from my left. It was like a trap. The glamour of the snow tricked me, lured me in with an illusion before he made his killing strike. The guys back at the helicopter saw him running me down, screamed my name. If the wind hadn’t carried their voices, I probably would’ve never heard. It was a split-second shot. Pure luck, nothing else. Their heads are small, sleek. It was an impossible shot. Frankly, to this day, I wonder if that bear actually got me and everything else is just a dying dream. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes just as you die? Everyone assumes it’s the memories of the life you’ve lived that flashes in your mind. But what if your whole life flashes before your eyes? Not just the life we lived but the life we were going to live? Sometimes I wonder about that,” he said. “What if all this” – he gestured around to the small, dilapidated house, his random collection of belongings, the world – “is just my life flashing before my eyes while that bear is tearing me apart?”

* * *

The following years, I wandered the deep forests, searching. I combed through hunting grounds during off season. I thought of those moments, those images of lost children captured on hunting cameras, glowing eerie and strange in the night, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. I thought back to the visions I’d had of Thomas Terrywile, the moments he was given form and shape again to wander in the wilderness, the moments when he would see campers or a vacationing family and try to reach out to them. It was like he had no voice to speak. Or maybe it was the people who had no ears to hear or eyes to see. Maybe everyone was looking at something else.

But I knew what I was searching for. I knew I could see them, because I knew where to look. I knew how to look, because I had been there. I had seen that evil presence. I had seen the beyond. I had glimpsed the horror underlying it all.

I wandered the hills, the mountains, everywhere for years, and I came to understand Rich’s experience in the tundra as much as I understood my own experience in the mountains. I was being watched, followed, tricked into looking at one thing while being savaged by another. The police were long gone. They could never be bothered to follow me out so deep into the wilderness, so far away. But there were others watching me in those deep forests, when I would spend days and nights surrounded by nothing but mountains and the maze of trees.

I would see them every once in a while, looking at me from a distance. Or their faces might appear from behind a tree. Michael, Conner and Gene waited for me out there, their faces distorted, their bodies moved by some unseen force. They were both dead and alive. Perhaps they were dead in this life but alive in another. Perhaps their corporeal forms were possessed with that cold blackness of the netherworld, forced to wander the world and do its bidding. I could feel that darkness in myself, as well. A core of cold that spread through my veins and grew like a cancer, changing me, influencing me, corrupting my thoughts. As I camped in the wilderness at night Michael, Conner and Gene would whisper to me, sitting just outside my tent, their strange voices penetrating the thin fabric and boring into my mind. Four friends brought together again. They told me what I must do. How I could win back my boy, my Jacob, and somehow make everything right again. Perhaps I had flashed forward, like Rich said. Perhaps this was all just a dying dream and I needed to wake.

I could hear them walk through the trees around my campsite. They would move things and sometimes take them in the middle of the night. They gave offerings at times, dead animals, whose carcasses would lie at the entrance to my tent. Offerings, trades; I knew what they wanted.

I found the perfect spot in the Appalachians, just beyond a small hunting town in Maine. It was a clearing in a sycamore forest, where the trees seemed to part in a natural circle and left the ground bare. I knew it was the right place because I saw, just for a moment, Jacob standing there in the center of it, staring at me with a quiet, pleading fear on his face, dressed in little boy clothes – the same outfit he wore when Mary sent him to school that day. He hadn’t aged a day. I looked like a crazed and ragged vagrant who’d been sleeping in the woods for weeks, but he recognized me. Then he was gone like a ghost or hallucination. I vomited right then out of shock and longing. I wished I could switch places with him. I would happily give my life for his. I walked into the center of that clearing, fell to my knees and felt his presence, as if he were standing just over my shoulder where I could not see him. I turned around and around, but he was always just out of sight.

I snatched six-year-old Ryan Temple from the edge of a soccer field while his family watched his older brother play a heated match against a rival town. I hadn’t made much of a plan, but everything just fell into place. I knew from the whispers outside my tent that I should be there, hidden in the bushes at the far edge of the field, which fell toward a brook and a small wood, a tentacle from the large forest beyond where my stone altar waited amid the sycamores. Ryan was a good-looking boy, skinny with a mop of hair, which seems to be the style for children these days. He was dressed well and had big brown eyes that sparkled with curiosity as he wandered along the wooded edge of the sports field.

He just disappeared from the world and into my arms. His parents were distracted. Everyone was looking away at just the perfect moment. Maybe they were watching the game. Maybe they were lost in the eyes of the strange-looking figure stalking near the parking lot on the opposite side of the field from me. Maybe they were wondering what such a horrid man was doing near their children, near a place where wholesome families gathered to reaffirm their lives were worth living, trying to create purpose in small, meaningless games. Ryan was drawn over to the far edge of the field by a moment of curiosity, sparked by something he perhaps saw or heard. I don’t know. But there he was, and I took him; no one knew better until we were far, far away.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life. The burgeoning horror of my actions was second only to the moment years ago when I knew my son was lost. The boy struggled against me, squirmed and cried. I felt sorry for him, but then all I could think of was Jacob’s horror at being taken that day, of Jacob’s cold terror, trapped in the eternal darkness, a plaything for this demon-god that now awaited my offering.

Do you see?

Yes, I saw. I saw what needed to be done. There was little that could possibly make my life worse but maybe one thing that could make Jacob’s better – even if it meant damning myself forever.

It was dark when I reached the clearing with my offering in tow, but the white stones I dug from the surrounding hills glowed in their occult pattern. At the edge of their soft light, I could see Conner, Michael and Gene and make out the strange symbols they had carved into the trees. They stood in a perfect triangular formation at the outer ring, their ghoulish countenances looking on. They seemed completely devoid of life, but there was some kind of eagerness emanating from their broken forms.

The child struggled and screamed. I clamped my dirty hand over his mouth. I stepped across the threshold of the circle and brought the poor, trembling boy to the center. Conner, Michael and Gene, my oldest friends, began to give up some awful chant; their mouths did not move, but the sound came – a summoning in half-formed words that I did not understand.

The rocks, the trees, the stars and the earth seemed to swirl around us in that moment. The glow of the stones grew more intense. The disembodied chants grew louder till they filled the air with their vibrations.

I put the boy on his feet in front of me and stood over him, holding him in place with my hands on his shoulders.

And I, in turn, could suddenly feel something standing over me, something familiar breathing down my neck with a sickening chuff.

The boy cried, but I held him there, waiting to see Jacob, waiting for him to suddenly appear and come back to me, and for this poor child to be relegated to that cold, dark place. It was an even trade. Sometimes we have to do awful things. I knew in my mind this was wrong, perhaps the most wrong thing I’d ever done. But there was Jacob. There was my boy trapped in that world, tortured and alone. I made my choice long ago when we buried Thomas Terrywile in Coombs’ Gulch and kept it secret to save my own skin.

A heavy, clawed hand clasped my shoulder. A shiver of knives traced down my spine. That terrified little boy looked up at me. His wide eyes glowed in the moonlight.

I am not a good man.